The widow Sarah was revered in Israel for the lavish endowment that maintained the Haleevie-Sekloong Hospital and its attendant research institutes on the slopes of Mount Carmel. She was honored in Hong Kong for the benefactions of the Jonathan and Sarah Foundation. Intelligent distribution of the Foundation’s abundant funds had transported the people of eleven villages in the rural New Territories on the mainland from medieval squalor to the era of electric light, modern sanitation, and primary schools. Above all, the Foundation offered those farmers the opportunity to remake their own lives by raising new strains of pigs, chickens, and rice.
Still, Sarah affected an inconsequential light-mindedness that verged on frivolity. She delighted in marathon sessions of Mah-Jongg and bridge to the counterpoint of mildly malicious gossip that spanned the fashionable world. That night, she wore a long aqua dress cut with expensive simplicity by Dior. Her only jewelry was a necklace of massive, square-cut emeralds set with barbaric ostentation in heavy red-gold links.
Beside Sarah in the circular reception hall of The Castle stood the third “dowager empress.” She was called simply Opal. She did not know her parents’ names, and she was a widow only by courtesy. She was, at forty-six, a statuesque Polynesian goddess in a flowing bronze silk robe splashed with orange hibiscus. Opal had come into Sir Jonathan’s bed as the last of his acknowledged concubines in 1939, when she was fifteen and he was fast closing eighty-six. When his yacht visited Tahiti for a long weekend, the Old Gentleman had bought her for $38 from the French official with whom she was living. She had been fiercely devoted to him, and, irrepressible Hong Kong gossip insisted, she had nourished him with her own milk in his senescense.
Opal was obsessively independent, for Sir Jonathan had left her a large trust fund, carefully secured against her compulsive generosity. Having freely transferred her devotion to Sarah and Lady Sekloong, she brooded over the older women’s comfort, scolding and cosseting them as if they were her own mother and her grandmother. They, in turn, overlooked her full-blooded amours.
Sarah and Opal waited in the great pink-marble-floored circle of the reception hall. Hand-rubbed teak paneling glowed in the soft light of candelabra, and incense wafted through the central air-conditioning. An embossed blue-and-white carpet covered the broad central staircase that divided at the landing into two arms. Above the fork of the Y hung an intricately curved Chinese character ten feet high. Its sinuous gilt loops invoked the blessing of long life.
The double doors on the landing swung open under the hands of a manservant wearing a white coat, black trousers, and cloth slippers. A couple descended the stairs, reflected in the polished brass of the long-life symbol. The gentleman’s left arm was crooked to support the lady’s hand, and their slow progress was a miniature royal procession.
Swarthy and stocky in full evening dress, the man wore two rows of medals. They included the American Silver Star and China-Burma-India Service Medal, as well as the British India Star. The jeweled Order of the Phoenix hung from his neck on a rainbow ribbon, while the broad pink-and-pearl sash of a Knight Commander of the British Empire diagonally bisected his starched shirtfront. The Chinese decoration had been conferred by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1941, the K.C.B.E. by King George VI in 1947, when its wearer left the post of Ambassador of the Nationalist Republic of China to the Court of St. James’s.
He had been christened Thomas Sekloong, but he called himself General Sek Lai-kwok when he executed special missions for his commander-in-chief in exile in Taiwan. As a young lieutenant he had briefly commanded a platoon in action more than forty years earlier. During the following decades he had rarely heard shots fired with intent to kill from a distance of less than twenty-five miles. He was a political general, a diplomat in uniform, adept at maneuvering among rival factions. His devotion to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek transcended fanaticism; it was an unquestioning, total commitment.
The General’s broad face was flushed with anger, and his arm trembled under his mother’s fingers. Though he was sixty-five, the Matriarch could still reduce him to impotent fury with one softly murmured sentence. He had, he knew, never been her favorite. Sometimes he suspected that she actually disliked him.
She had, once again, enraged him by her instructions that evening. His wide eyes, normally placid, smoldered above his broad cheekbones. He was not sure that he could follow his mother’s wishes, though his personal credo placed filial obedience above even loyalty to his leader. The General looked down at the small figure beside him with more awe than love in his dark-brown eyes.
The crown of her head was thick with abundant hair drawn back into a soft knot. At ninety, Lady Mary’s frost-white hair was her chief vanity; she had delighted inordinately in its flaming red-gold profusion when she was twenty. Her high forehead and wrinkled-petal cheeks were translucent ivory, while her withered-crepe throat was concealed by the high collar of her red-gold-and-green Chinese silk jacket. Three strands of graduated apple-green jade beads strung between diamonds cascaded onto her breast. She still treasured her jewelry, above all the four-inch-square jade plaque carved in bas-relief with the arrogant Sekloong dragon that hung below her necklace. Her loose-cut gown, red-gold-and-green like her jacket, was faced with embroidered strips of mauve asters, each minuscule blossom so realistically embroidered it seemed to shine with dew.
Beneath the finery, she was as fragile as a wax figure, but she was still vain of her small feet and her slender fingers ringed with diamonds and jade. Her gold-embroidered pumps sought each tread with caution. She was an old, old lady, and she strove for decorum. But the majesty of her bearing was dispelled when her eyes sparkled with joy or anger like an eager young child’s.
Sarah Haleevie Sekloong stepped forward to claim the Matriarch’s right hand, and Thomas happily relinquished his featherweight burden. His mother’s violet eyes flashed imperiously to remind him of her wishes.
“Good evening, Mother. A very happy birthday.” Sarah spoke with unaccustomed formality as she leaned forward to kiss the crumpled-velvet cheek.
“Good evening, Lady Mary. A hundred more for our sake!” Opal’s dark voice still echoed the silver-starred skies over her native isles. She enveloped the frail figure in her strong arms, half-bearing Lady Mary to the black wood chair from which the Matriarch would receive her guests. All Hong Kong—and half the world, it seemed—called her Lady Mary. As the widow of a baronet, she should have been called Lady Sekloong. But the former title was peculiarly her own.
“Good evening, Sarah. Good evening, Opal.” Lady Mary, too, spoke with unwonted formality, her high-pitched voice still carrying traces of her North Country origin. “Good evening, girls. But don’t wish that on me. I don’t think I could bear another ten, much less a hundred. And, for Heaven’s sake, don’t fuss.”
“It’s your party, Mother,” Thomas reminded her, “and a grand occasion.”
“Yes, it is. Perhaps foolish on my part, but we’ll go through with it now. If you do something foolish, then go the whole hog.”
The ponderous front doors opened to admit a tendril of intrusive fog and a flashing glimpse of the crimson-and-gilt crown that marked the vice-regal Rolls-Royce. The servants’ half-bows greeted Sir David Trench, Governor of Hong Kong. His bulky figure was the self-conscious embodiment of the fading grandeur of his sovereign half a world away in London. Runnels of sweat ran down his weathered cheeks, and he eased the stiff collar under his white tie with a spatulate forefinger.
“Good evening, Lady Mary,” he said formally. “Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to convey her warm wishes and her admiration. She hopes to see you again in London soon. And may I add our own heartiest congratulations and best wishes for many more?”
“Thank you, David—and Margaret.” Lady Mary nodded to Lady Trench. “I shall write the Queen to express my deepest gratitude and loyal devotion. But to old friends—my joyous thanks and my love.”
More than practiced charm, the Governor concluded as he had in the past, much
more. When she spoke to you, all her mind was fixed on you alone and her every word was deeply felt, whether the words were pleasant or unpleasant. He was relieved by her omitting his title. She had known him since he was a twenty-year-old cadet in the Colonial Service. He would have felt chilled if she had again addressed him formally as “Sir David” because of their continuing argument over the Hong Kong Government’s land policy.
“Bunch of thieves you’re conniving with,” she had snapped at their last meeting. “That lot at Victoria Landholdings are all thieves—always have been. And you’re letting them drive land prices up so high, not just the poor, but the middle classes will suffer desperately. Then we’ll be for it. Theft, yes, Sir David, theft by all means. Hong Kong’s built on theft. But intelligent theft with moderation, if you please, Sir David.”
The Governor flushed at the memory as he bowed over her hand. He knew that she was right, and he also knew that he was powerless. He stepped aside in relief when a high-pitched voice called over his shoulder.
“Mother! Mother darling! All our love and so many happy returns.”
Charlotte Barakian descended upon Lady Mary, a whirlwind incarnate in a mink stole over an extravagantly draped, pale-green dress. The shock of her décolleté slashed almost to the waist was dimmed by the single 112-carat diamond that hung between her breasts on a platinum chain. The Star of Jaipur was her husband’s latest and most publicized gift. Gorgeously and unabashedly tinted its original color, her hair flamed red-gold, and she moved with the exuberance of a woman a quarter century younger than her sixty-six years.
As his wife enfolded her mother, Avram Barakian bowed gravely. The shipping magnate was tall, and his dark features were saturnine despite his jutting, aggressive nose. Only his carefully waved white pompadour revealed vanity; with his tailcoat the billionaire wore unadorned black-onyx studs and cufflinks.
“Enough, Charlotte, enough,” Lady Mary laughed in mock protest. “We all love you, too. But don’t smother me or I’ll never see another birthday.”
Following the Barakians, Joe Sek, a seedy clerk in a third-rate import-export house, was ill at ease in his mossy-green dinner jacket. Lady Mary offered him a particularly warm smile because she could not recall exactly where the seedy clerk fitted on the convoluted family tree. The poor relation was followed by the rich Seks, Harold and William, twin great-grandsons of the Old Gentleman and his first wife, whom he had married under traditional Chinese law. The twins rivaled the fortune of the main line with wealth accumulated through arms-running, gold-smuggling, and the drug traffic. Behind them bowed Sir Mosing Way, Hong Kong’s premier Chinese knight, who was almost as old as Lady Mary herself and serenely dignified in a blue silk long-gown.
Lady Mary held out her arms to her son James, whom the world knew as General Shih Ai-kuo, Deputy Political Commissar of the Communist People’s Liberation Army—though Lady Mary would not call him Ai-kuo, she was stirred to pride by his air of distinction, even in the austere, gray-blue tunic.
“We must talk later, James,” she whispered when he bent to kiss her. “It’s been too many years.”
General Shih Ai-kuo’s eyes misted. He nodded distantly to his eldest brother, the Nationalist General. Yet James Sekloong, not General Shih Ai-kuo, took his place beside Thomas Sekloong behind their mother’s chair. Communist General Shih Ai-kuo contemplated the ceiling when the American Under Secretary of State Spencer Taylor Smith stepped forward, but James Sekloong smiled with unfeigned pleasure at his niece Blanche, the Under Secretary’s wife.
The guests were arriving in waves, and the reception hall was filled with a babbling sea of greetings. Lady Mary’s memory catalogued each guest automatically, but her thoughts strayed to contemplate the tumultuous panorama of the past. She was still surprised by the size and vigor of the unruly clan she had dominated since the Old Gentleman’s death.
The Sekloongs, themselves insecurely straddling two antagonistic worlds, were an unstable compound of arrogance and insecurity, generosity and baseness, talent and mediocrity. Their blood was a volatile mixture of East and West. Though they considered themselves at home in both worlds, some of the elder Sekloongs lived in perpetual unease. The “touch of the tar brush” at which Lady Mary’s father had sneered made them alternately uncertain and assertive. But the younger Sekloongs, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren, gloried in their mixed background. As did their great wealth, their exotic heritage attracted admirers—as well as sycophants, toadies, and spongers. Horrifying to her own contemporaries, their mixed races were attractive to their new milieu. The jet set, she had heard them called. She shuddered delicately at the barbarous term.
The older generation bolstered its self-esteem by pursuing money, fame, and social position; some had even learned that hard-won achievements brought solace. Titles, too, they pursued, decorations, honors, and even notoriety. The Old Gentleman’s compulsive drive still animated his descendants, and almost all were avid in their desires.
She had assured herself that her own children would never forget their Chinese heritage. They knew that the Westernized cities of Asia—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai—had been built by Chinese brains and Chinese brawn. They knew that the Sekloongs had played a decisive role in shaping both those cities and China itself. They uninhibitedly utilized their Chinese connections, skillfully manipulating the network of power and wealth that encompassed not only Asia, but Europe and the United States as well.
The foreigners—the Europeans and the Americans—were an impermanent force in Asia, and the foreigners felt themselves less secure each day. Almost all finally retired to their own home countries, subtly defeated by Asia. The Sekloongs themselves might some day become superfluous to an aggressively nationalistic and racist Asia. But that day could be long postponed, for they had representatives in all camps.
It had been totally different when she first came to Hong Kong. The white man’s rule seemed permanently fixed, while the Asian seemed forever doomed to subjugation. Yet both the proconsuls of the expanding white empires and the Mandarins of the decaying Chinese Empire had been equally arrogant and complacent.
She remembered, and her eyes were soft as morning-dewed violets. Cherished as lovingly as her collection of ivory, jade, bronze, and porcelain figures, her memories, though clear as ever, had acquired luster with the passing years.
She recalled her first landing in Hong Kong seventy years earlier—before The Castle was built, before she had even heard the name Sekloong. She remembered the flurried emotions that bewildered a callow girl, and she saw again the holystoned teak decks of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Orion.
Part 1
MARY
May 28, 1900–December 26, 1900
May 28, 1900
Mary Philippa Osgood was four weeks removed from the twentieth birthday that would, by the rigid standards of the late Victorian era, transform her from a young woman into a spinster. Never during the preceding nineteen years and eleven months had she been as acutely aware of her own body as she was at 8:15 on the morning of May 28, 1900. Dancing across the ruffled Pearl River Estuary, the gusts that swelled the vestigial sails of the Orion molded her ankle-length dress to the curves of her bosom, her hips, and her legs.
Before leaving England seven weeks earlier, she had bought a new dress for £5, her Aunt Margaret’s generous going-away gift. The motherly wife of the major commanding the home depot of the Royal Wessex Fusiliers had helped her select the long-wearing dark blue serge the Stepney mercers recommended as “eminently suitable for summer.” But the “lightweight” fabric was a sackcloth torment in the 92° heat and 93 percent humidity when the Orion left the fresh sea air behind on entering the western approaches to Hong Kong.
She had daringly discarded her camisole along with two of her three petticoats, and she wore her lightest stays. The major’s wife had confided that the corsets suitable for the English summer could be agonizingly confining in the faraway, subtropical Crown Colony. Nonetheless, Ma
ry was uncomfortably aware of her nipples’ swelling under the chafing serge. Perspiration dripped between her full breasts, trickling down to tremble on the secret tendrils of hair that covered the parts she thought of as “the place between my thighs.” Though she remembered shameful dreams, she had never known such intense awareness of her body before this voyage. Was this, she wondered uneasily, the spell of the sensuous, sinful East? She was profoundly conscious of being a woman, not only a woman in all her parts, but a white woman surrounded by men of color.
Soft-padded fingers grasped her elbow to steady her against the ship’s motion with excessive concern, though her own hands gripped the foredeck rail. The pressure was light and deferential, but, she felt in her heightened awareness, somehow predatory. Abruptly, her North Country common sense asserted itself. She laughed at her fancies and brushed back a tendril of red-gold hair. The gesture strained her breasts against the light serge, and her companion caught his breath.
“Miss Osgood, there it is, just over the horizon. You can see the loom against the clouds.”
Hilary Metcalfe’s deep voice recalled her to a reality different from any she had known. Orion was steaming among rocky islets veined with emerald vegetation, which lay upon the wind-brushed sea like meteorites. In the distance on her left a wisp of smoke rose, and a dark shape that might have been a small craft bobbed beneath an elongated, vertical shadow that might have been a sail. She saw no other sign of human life. Yet her nostrils were assailed by unfamiliar odors that swamped the clean tang of the sea: wood-smoke and incense; an unpleasant mustiness and the reek of corruption; a nauseatingly fecal stench and a garlic-laden, many-spiced scent.
“The fragrance of the East, essence of the Orient,” Metcalfe rumbled in her ear. “They call it Hong Kong—the Fragrant Port. There’s the stench of decay, of course, but mainly the effluvia of the chief Chinese occupation—eating. There’s wood-smoke, garlic, coriander, anise, vinegar, oyster sauce, dried fish, and barbecued pork. And, over all, dark brown, pungent soy-sauce.”
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